Hell Is Torture! My meteorb sorc is 75 and Hell kicks me to the curb. Well, not really me, but rather my merc, who, of course, I rely on heavily to tank things long enough for meteor or forb to kill them. He can't. He's wearing Haemosu's Adament and a Crown of Thieves and is weilding a Hwanin's Justice. He's got about 2k defense, and he just gets stomped when there's more than one or two mobs next to him. What do I do? How do I cope with the combination of harsh damage output and elemental immunities in Hell difficulty? If the problem is that he needs more armor, I've been running NM Pindle + Baal dedicatedly, and nothing better has dropped yet and I'm not sure what I'd be looking for.
Using meteor may be part of the problem. Despite the name, a Meteorb sorc actually uses Fireball with Frozen Orb. However, your merc still needs better gear. I'd suggest gathering up some perfect gems and seeing what you can get through trading.
If you can manage to find an eth elite armour and cube socket it for either 3 or 4 sockets then you can make a nice cheap very high defense merc armour.Duress in 3 socket armour shael/um/thul or stone in 4 socket shael/um/pul/lum. Personally I prefer duress for the crushing blow and open wounds but either will work fro your merc. A weapon like bonehew or ariocs needle would help your merc also and these you should be able to find for pgems or low runes.
Your merc will need some life leech, better resistances and a general overhaul. Look here for fitting cheap equipment: Decent Cheap Merc Gear and Builds Mine is doing fine in Hell and all he wears is: Tal's Mask Griswold Armor with some junk runes and gems Insight runeword in a Colossus Voulge Keywords are: lifeleech and resistances. Another chep option: Bonehew, Tal's Mask, Duriel's Shell
You should also level up a bid more. Lvl 75 is pretty much the minimum to move from NM to hell. I don't really concider my leveling part done until level 85 (at least). Join some pubby baal run games, or wait until someone hosts them in our forums channel (op diabloii.net). Once you've leveled up to 85+, then resume MFing and make sure to let your merc level up to your level also.
Will the pubbie Baal runs be that much better XP than solo running Baal? Randoms are all stupid, crazy, or both, and they take all the drops.
Forget about the drops in pubbies. You are only there for the exp and yes the speed at which you can exp in an 8 player game is simply not comparable. Should get fine exp at lvl75 doing NM Baalruns. Try some of the pubbies, you will eventually end up with one that is fun. I would offer to create games with you and do the teleing, but i deleted my Meteorb and stared freshly on Blizzballer, which is sadly not yet in the state to do NM Baals (lvl15 ). Just don't count on drops form NM Baal pubbies. This is just about fast EXP gathering, nothing else.
NM baal pubbies really slow down the exp after level 75. I'd stick to hell baal runs to get higher levels. We used to have forum baal runs every night. Just go to channel "op diabloii.net". They are even nice about sharing drops. The standard practice is that every game they rotate who gets all the drops for that game.
